One time, Margery had arranged to stay at the house overnight so that her mother could get a proper rest for once. It was a warm evening, and she thought a bit of air might help her father’s lungs, but under the black-out regulations no light was allowed to show after nightfall, so she let the fire in the grate go out, turned off all the lights, and then opened the windows, letting in a blissful cool breeze. In the pitch black, Margery couldn’t see a thing, but she could tell that her father was in a particularly bad way. In between his desperate gasps for breath, she heard a furious ripping noise, and it took a few moments for her to realise what it was – Mr Pott was tearing his sheets to shreds. Since childhood Margery had been familiar with his strong, sinewy hands, the muscles developed from years of tying ropes at the brewery, but right now the thought of them ripping through the fabric of the bedclothes sent a chill down her spine.
For the first time in her life, Margery felt afraid of her father. Despite his sickness, there was strength in him yet, and his grip on reality was failing. If he suddenly reached out and took hold of her, she wasn’t sure she would be able to get away.
Margery ran from the room, locking the door behind her, and went upstairs to find her mother. ‘What’s the matter?’ Mrs Pott asked her anxiously, as she came into her bedroom.
‘He’s tearing the bedclothes to pieces, Mum,’ Margery told her. ‘He can’t go on like this!’
But Mrs Pott was adamant. ‘I don’t want him going to a hospital,’ she insisted.
Margery knew her mum’s feelings on the subject, but it didn’t seem right to do nothing while her father continued to suffer. ‘I’m calling the doctor,’ she announced defiantly. ‘Wait here.’
Then she ran up the road to find a phone box, where she summoned the local doctor to come and help.
When Margery returned to the maltster’s house, she found her mother wringing her hands. ‘They’ll take him into hospital, I know they will,’ Mrs Pott cried. ‘I can’t be here to see that.’ She picked up her coat and ran out of the house, leaving Margery all alone.
Margery went to sit by her father’s bedside once again. He was still twisting the bedclothes between his fingers, but he was quieter now and she no longer felt so afraid of him.
When the doctor arrived, he regarded Mr Pott with a look of deepest pity. ‘Your father should have gone into hospital a long time ago,’ he told Margery, shaking his head sadly. ‘They wouldn’t have let him live like this. They’d have given him morphine for the pain and he would be gone by now.’
Margery nodded. She knew that what the man was saying was true. No one would want to carry on living in the state her father was in. ‘I understand,’ she told the doctor soberly.
There was just one problem. Thanks to the war, all the local hospital beds were full, and the only place that would take Mr Pott was an asylum. ‘You and I both know he’s not insane,’ the doctor told Margery, ‘but all the pain he’s suffered has done something terrible to his mind.’ He drew a form out of his bag and handed it over to her. ‘I’m afraid I’ll need a signature on this,’ he said. ‘I can’t have him taken away without authorisation.’
Margery held the form in her hand, wavering for a moment. Having her father committed to an institution was a responsibility she wasn’t sure she could bear. She had always been the baby of the family, yet now she was being asked to make the biggest decision the Potts had ever faced.
But then, there was no question in her mind that it was the right thing to do, that it was in her father’s best interests. And if not her, who else was going to do it?
Margery took a pen from the doctor and added her signature to the form.
‘You’re doing the right thing,’ he reassured her. ‘It’ll all be over soon, I guarantee it. Three days at the most, and he’ll be at peace.’
A little while later an ambulance arrived, and Mr Pott was taken away. Margery watched in silence as the vehicle disappeared into the blackout.
In the morning, Margery awoke to find that her mother had returned to the maltster’s house. ‘It’s done, then?’ she asked her quietly.
Margery nodded. ‘They took him in, Mum,’ she told her. ‘But don’t worry, it’s for the best.’ She couldn’t bring herself to mention the paperwork that she had signed.
That morning, Margery went to work in Equipment Accounts as usual, but as soon as her shift ended she cycled straight over to the mental hospital. ‘Your father’s this way,’ one of the nurses told her when she arrived. ‘Such a lovely old man, isn’t he?’
Margery followed the nurse into a little room, where Mr Pott was asleep on a bed. For a moment she almost didn’t recognise him. The staff at the hospital had shaved off his bushy moustache, and it made him look a good ten years younger. But there was more to it than that, and it took Margery a moment to work out what it was that seemed so different. For the first time in as long as she could remember, her father was totally free from pain. Margery could still hear the familiar rattling noise every time he breathed in or out, but the breaths were shallower now, and they didn’t seem to require such a terrible effort.
The next day, Margery came to see her father again, and again he slept through her entire visit. But she didn’t mind that she wasn’t able to talk to him – it was reassuring just to see him sleeping so peacefully.
On the third day, she was working in the office at Titchfield when she received a phone call from her eldest sister, Jessie. Their father had passed away early that morning, just as the doctor had predicted.
Margery hung up the phone and sat rooted to the spot for several minutes, as the tears began to stream down her face. After a while, one of the other girls came and put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You ought to go home, Corp,’ she said gently.
‘Oh no, I can’t,’ Margery protested, weakly. ‘I need to get on with my work.’
‘It can wait,’ the other girl told her. ‘Let me go and talk to the squadron leader.’
Margery was issued with a three-day pass, and sent home to be with her mother. By the time she got back to the maltster’s house, Jessie and her husband had already arrived. At the funeral a few days later, the four of them were the only mourners. Jessie had paid for the grave, but there was no money left over for a headstone.
Margery never did tell her mother about the paperwork she had signed to admit her father to the asylum, but as she stood and watched him being carefully lowered into the ground, there was no doubt in her mind that she had done the right thing. He was out of his misery now, just like the doctor had promised, and mingled with her sadness at losing him was an overpowering feeling of relief.
Back at RAF Titchfield, preparations were underway for the departure of the girls who were going overseas. Given the circumstances, Margery could certainly have told them that she had changed her mind, that she wanted to be near to her mother at such a difficult time. But that would have felt like backing away from an opportunity, something she was no longer prepared to do.
None of the WAAFs who had volunteered for foreign postings knew where they were going, but that didn’t stop friends and colleagues from cracking plenty of jokes on the subject. ‘I hope you’re good with chopsticks!’ Margery’s flight sergeant teased her at a leaving party thrown by the girls in Equipment Accounts.
Margery was rather surprised to discover that she was the only one from the office who would be going. Although several of the girls had talked about volunteering for the overseas positions, no one else had actually gone through with it.
The first stage of Margery’s journey was to a dispersal camp near Birmingham, where the girls would be kitted out for their eventual destination. She had to change trains in London, and spent most of the journey up to the Midlands sitting next to a young woman who was clutching a small child in her arms, along with a bundle of ragged clothes. ‘We just got bombed out,’ she told Margery, by way of explanation.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Margery replied. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’ve got
a sister up north, so we’re gonna stay with her,’ the girl told her. ‘Only she don’t know about it yet.’
Margery was touched by the sight of the poor woman, carrying all that was left of her worldly belongings. Amid all the excitement that she had felt at the prospect of going abroad, it was a sobering reminder that the war continued to bring misery to people up and down the land.
At the dispersal camp, Margery was given a draft number, which she dutifully painted onto her kitbag – there were no brushes available but she managed to improvise with a twig – and lined up with about thirty other girls to be issued with a khaki shirt, skirt and ankle socks. ‘We must be going somewhere hot then,’ one of the others commented gleefully.
Then it was time for their injections – tetanus, typhoid and yellow fever – all of which Margery endured bravely. She had come a long way since her basic training at Innsworth, when she had fainted at the mere sight of a needle.
The WAAF girls continued to play a guessing game as to what their destination might be. Surely the yellow fever vaccine meant they were headed for India, one girl reasoned. Another was convinced that the wide-brimmed topee hats they had been issued with indicated a trip to the Far East. But as if to frustrate those desperate to decipher the clues, the topees were collected up again an hour or so after they’d been handed out. Did that mean the girls’ destination had been changed, or had someone in the stores simply made a mistake?
That evening the girls were taken by lorry to a railway station, where they boarded a train waiting in a siding. They were each issued with some bread and corned beef for dinner, as well as a cotton ‘ditty bag’ paid for by the Daily Mail, which provided each girl with a notebook, pencils and playing cards to help pass the time on the journey.
A little after midnight the train finally began to move, and the girls woke at 7 a.m. the next morning to find they had arrived in Greenock, Scotland. There they were ushered on board the Capetown Castle, a beautiful white ocean liner with a large red-and-black funnel. ‘You can leave your kitbags in the cabins and head straight to breakfast,’ one of the crewmen told them.
In the dining room, the WAAFs found themselves waited on by men in white jackets, seated at little tables which were covered in crisp tablecloths and vases of flowers. The refined atmosphere made it feel almost as if they were heading off on the grand tour, not being shipped to a military base overseas. ‘There’s no need to make your beds in the mornings,’ another crewman informed Margery. ‘The stewards will take care of that for you.’
The WAAFs spent the next few days on board waiting to depart, but despite their impatience to get going the time passed pleasantly enough. Mostly, they were free to do as they wished, but once a day everyone would be summoned on deck to rehearse the ‘abandon ship’ procedure, to be used if they were hit by an enemy torpedo. In the event of such an attack, Margery’s orders were to rush down to the lower decks and collect a box containing flashlights that could be attached to the girls’ lifejackets so that they could find each other bobbing around in the sea.
No one really wanted to think about the possibility of a U-boat attack – least of all Margery, who literally couldn’t swim to save her life. The girls were haunted by stories they had heard of the sinking of the Laconia in September 1942, when more than 1,500 people had perished. But the daily rehearsals of what to do in the event of catastrophe helped to take the edge off their fears.
After a couple of days waiting in harbour, Margery had grown used to the constant gentle rocking of the boat under her feet, and when somebody shouted, ‘We’re moving!’ the news caught her off guard. She rushed up on deck to join the other girls as they slowly pulled away from the quayside.
When the Capetown Castle emerged into the Firth of Clyde it was joined by a couple of battleships, which would be escorting the WAAFs across the ocean. Together, the three vessels made their way down the West coast of Scotland and through the Irish Sea, until they found themselves not far from Penzance, at the southernmost tip of the British Isles.
As the ship continued its voyage south, the girls on board turned to watch their country recede into the distance. Before long everything that Margery had ever known was little more than a dot on the horizon. She could only guess what land might lie ahead of her.
9
Kathleen
After many months in the Land Army, Kathleen’s body had gradually grown stronger and more resilient as she adapted to the rigours of 12-hour days working the land. Now she was determined to try again with the Navy, so she said her goodbyes to Minnie and the rest of the staff in the strange old house at Bury St Edmunds, and took a train down to London. There she made her way to the national headquarters of the WRNS, which was housed above Drummond’s Bank in Trafalgar Square.
But despite her best efforts to convince the women there that she was just what the service needed, they insisted that there still wasn’t a place for her. ‘I’m sorry,’ one of them told her, ‘but we’ve just got too many people volunteering at the moment. Maybe you could try again in another six months.’
Kathleen was disappointed at being turned down by the WRNS for a second time, and it was especially galling to think that while she had been waiting to reapply, other girls had taken the available places. But she couldn’t bear the thought of heading back to the house in Bury with her tail between her legs, so instead she began looking for war work in London.
Before long, Kathleen had swapped the jumper and breeches of a land girl for the blue overalls of an ambulance auxiliary. It was far from the high couture of the tailored Wren uniform that she had long coveted, but at least, she reasoned, the new job would bring with it different challenges – and, hopefully, less back-breaking work.
Since she didn’t drive, Kathleen was paired up with a girl who did – a young woman called Hilde with whom she was soon sharing a small flat in Chiswick. The two girls hit it off instantly, and when Kathleen learned Hilde’s sad story it only cemented the bond. ‘My husband walked out as soon as he found out I was pregnant,’ Hilde confided one evening, explaining that her daughter Joy was now living with a family in the countryside while she worked on the ambulances to support her.
Hilde and Kathleen’s ambulance – in reality a converted van – was based at the offices of United Dairies in Chiswick, a location they came to know extremely well as they spent night after night there sitting around waiting for the phone to ring. The other volunteers included several members of the same family, who had all volunteered together and were all actors. Kathleen and Hilde soon grew used to being hugged and kissed effusively whenever they came into the office, and to being addressed exclusively as ‘darling’. More of a trial were the histrionic rows between the father and his eldest daughter, which seemed to erupt on a daily basis and frequently descended into furious swearing matches.
On the whole, though, it was a quiet time for the men and women working on the ambulances. Since the London Blitz had come to an end in May 1941, German attacks on the capital had grown increasingly infrequent, limited to the occasional ‘nuisance raids’ on targets of no military significance. But while they might be little more than a nuisance as far as winning the war was concerned, these small, sporadic attacks could be deadly for the poor souls caught up in them.
The first time Hilde and Kathleen were called out, it was to a pub in Hammersmith which had suffered a direct hit. They hopped in their little van and sped over as quickly as possible, reaching the bombsite within ten minutes.
By the time the girls arrived, there were plenty of other people already on the scene. ‘No point going in there,’ a Special Constable told Kathleen, as she gazed in horror at the pile of rubble where only minutes before the pub had stood. ‘There were a load of troops in the cellar when it hit. The pipes down there burst and the lot of them drowned before we could get them out.’
As the policeman turned and walked off into the darkness, Kathleen became aware of a dog barking somewhere nearby. She followed the sound to a house a
djacent to the pub, which had also been badly damaged. Most of the front wall had come down, and Kathleen walked through a space where the door had once stood into what was left of the living room.
Inside she found a black-and-white sheepdog, which by now was howling plaintively, a few feet away from the body of an old man who was evidently its master. ‘It’s all right,’ she told the distraught animal, in as calm a voice as she could manage. She didn’t dare reach out a hand to stroke it, in case it lashed out and bit her in fear.
Kathleen continued to make cooing noises at the dog while she knelt down to examine the old man. He was alive, but only just. A large part of his face had been blown off by the explosion, and his breathing was shallow. She could tell at once that he had no chance of surviving his injuries.
Kathleen took a towel and wrapped it around the man’s head. Then she sat on the floor, gently cradling him, all the while whispering to the frantic dog, ‘It’s all right, don’t worry, it’s all right.’
Within a couple of minutes the last spark of life had departed and Kathleen set the man’s lifeless body down on the floor. Then she went to summon Hilde, and between them they heaved him onto a stretcher and carried him out to their ambulance.
As they drove away, she could still hear the poor dog howling, rooted to the spot in the room where its master had died.
The bomb had left no survivors for the girls to transport to the local hospital, so instead they drove straight to Hammersmith Cemetery, where a man on the gate directed them towards the mortuary. There were so many bodies coming in that night that the building was already full, and as the corpses arrived they were being laid out on the pavement outside. Kathleen tried not to look at the faces, but she couldn’t help noticing that many of them had been terribly disfigured and some bodies were missing arms or legs.
By the time Kathleen and Hilde had got the old man out of the ambulance and laid him out alongside the other victims of the night’s raid, their shift was coming to an end. They returned the ambulance to the United Dairies offices, and trudged back to their little flat. It was only once they were on their way home that the horror of the evening overcame them, and they both had to stop and vomit by the side of the road.
The Girls Who Went to War Page 13